It is not the most creative name they could have chosen, but Meta released a successor to their open source “Llama” language model yesterday.

Meta:

We’re now ready to open source the next version of Llama 2 and are making it available free of charge for research and commercial use. We’re including model weights and starting code for the pretrained model and conversational fine-tuned versions too.

Unlike the original Llama release, Meta took the extra step to license this new model for commercial use.

As Satya Nadella announced on stage at Microsoft Inspire, we’re taking our partnership to the next level with Microsoft as our preferred partner for Llama 2 and expanding our efforts in generative AI. Starting today, Llama 2 is available in the Azure AI model catalog, enabling developers using Microsoft Azure to build with it and leverage their cloud-native tools for content filtering and safety features. It is also optimized to run locally on Windows, giving developers a seamless workflow as they bring generative AI experiences to customers across different platforms.

Just unbelievable positioning from Microsoft. Now, not only is their infrastructure powering all of OpenAI’s models, they are now working with Meta to support the leading alternative to OpenAI.